Google unveiled recently through a statement on the Chromium blog that has taken the decision to suspend the release of future versions of Chrome and Chrome OS for the time being according to the launch calendar they have established, with which the indicated dates would be postponed until further notice.
And it is that since the beginning of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) a large number of events have been canceled around the world related to technology, from the Mobile World Congress, the Game Developer Conference, the 2020 edition of E3 and many others.
At the level of each company, the consequences are also felt, especially for companies that produce consumer goods. Nintendo, for example, declared production and shipping delays for its Switch console inevitable.
Sony and Microsoft have also raised the same fears regarding the launch of their respective Play Station 5 and Xbox Series X console. Apple, for its part, is also preparing to face the same problems with the risk that the iPhone will not be available in the market due to the closure of production plants based in China.
For service companies, one of the solutions adopted to reduce the impact of the pandemic in their activities is allowing your employees to work remotely.
Currently Google, which has more than 100,000 workers all over the world working from home and also facing the travel problems of its workers in various places around the world.
To continue providing its services, the Mountain View firm has issued an informational notice authorizing all of its employees from the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Africa to work remotely. But despite all these adaptations, Google's activities are slowing down.
A few days ago, Google announced that its YouTube teams and partner companies that help you evaluate videos for potential rule violations they began to decline as the pandemic gained ground.
As a result, the Mountain View firm would begin to rely much more on artificial intelligence to do some of the work that reviewers normally do. This means that automated systems will begin to remove content without human scrutiny, Google warns.
After YouTube, now the Chrome browser and the Chrome OS operating system are the most affected by the consequences of the coronavirus.
Since Wednesday, the web giant has announced that:
“Due to tight work hours at the moment, we are discontinuing the next versions of Chrome and Chrome OS.
Our primary goals are to ensure that Chrome remains stable, secure, and works reliably for everyone who relies on it.
We will continue to prioritize all security-related updates to be included in Chrome 80 «
In other words, Chrome 81, to be released on March 24, is currently discontinued. Chrome 82 and 83, which will launch in May and June respectively, could also be affected if the pandemic is not controlled.
While Google presents the coronavirus argument to justify this decision to suspend the next versions of Chrome and Chrome OS, Other people believe that if it is Google, we must be sure that their engineers are able to work remotely and have all the resources they need to continue releasing new versions.
According to some of lthe reasons that would have led Google to freeze publications of these updates and in particular for Chrome, would be to avoid introducing regressions during the pandemic period and that they could break sites while being accessed.
Finally, anyway, Google says that it continues to work on the current versions of Chrome and Chrome OS and provide updates and fixes for errors that are detected, so they report that there should be no concern about this part.
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